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by John O'Neil

4

Overview:

Robert H. Bork was a former solicitor general, federal judge and conservative legal theorist whose 1987 nomination to the United States Supreme Court was rejected by the Senate in a historic political battle whose impact is still being felt.
He died on Dec. 19, 2012, at the age of 85.
Mr. Bork, who was senior judicial adviser to the 2012 presidential campaign of Gov. Mitt Romney, played a small but crucial role in the Watergate crisis as the solicitor general under President Richard M. Nixon. He carried out orders to fire a special prosecutor in what became known as “the Saturday Night Massacre.” He also handed down notable decisions from the federal appeals court bench. But it was as a symbol of the nation’s culture wars that Mr. Bork made his name.
It is rare for the Senate in its constitutional “advice and consent” role to turn down a president’s Supreme Court nominee, and rarer still for that rejection to be based not on qualifications but on judicial philosophy and temperament. That turned Mr. Bor

by John O'Neil

8

Overview:

President John F. Kennedy was informed about the deployment of Soviet medium-range missiles on Cuba shortly after 8 a.m. on the morning of Tuesday, Oct. 16, 1962. His first reaction on hearing the news from National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy was to accuse the Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev of a double-cross. "He can’t do this to me," he sputtered.
Thus began the celebrated "13 days" that brought the world closer than ever before — or since — to a nuclear war, a period now remembered in the West as the Cuban Missile Crisis. The crisis peaked on Oct. 27, "Black Saturday," when a series of startling events, including the shooting down of an American U-2 spy plane over Cuba, suggested that neither Khrushchev nor Kennedy fully controlled their own military machines. The presidential aide and historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. described the October 1962 confrontation as the "most dangerous moment in human history."